So you've found a great site to contribute content to -- or have you? Columnist Stephan Spencer provides advice for how to evaluate potential publishers for SEO benefits.

So you’ve written an amazing piece and scored the placement of your dreams. It took hours of blood, sweat and tears to brainstorm the topic, develop a clever hook, write the copy and source compelling imagery — not to mention the research and the outreach required to score the perfect publisher. And now you eagerly await the payoff: that hard-earned “link love” to drive up your Google rankings.

Well, unfortunately, depending on where it was published, you may be waiting a long time.

Let me let you in on a dirty little secret: publishing your content on many popular sites gives you zero SEO benefit.

About The Author

Stephan Spencer is the creator of the 3-day immersive SEO seminar Traffic Control; an author of the O’Reilly books The Art of SEO, Google Power Search, and Social eCommerce; founder of the SEO agency Netconcepts (acquired in 2010); inventor of the SEO proxy technology GravityStream; and the host of two podcast shows The Optimized Geek and Marketing Speak.